Cher Suffered Through A Miscarriage 'Nightmare' — 'I Lost Four Kids Before Chaz'

The Burlesque star opens up about her struggle to have a baby with Sonny Bono.

Cher is back in the new film Burlesque, co-starring Christina Aguilera, and she recently spoke to Parade magazine about her struggle to get pregnant with her ex-husband, Sonny Bono. After marrying Sonny in 1963, Cher suffered a string of miscarriages, which she called a “nightmare.” “I lost four kids before Chaz,” the singer, 64, says referring to her daughter Chastity, who underwent a sex change last year and now goes by the name of Chaz). “It’s a spontaneous miscarriage, something that spontaneously aborts the fetus. It’s called an angry uterus. It took a long time for someone to tell me that that’s what it was. It just starts to contract, for no reason. After the third time, it got to be a nightmare. People would be congratulating me because I was pregnant, and then I wouldn’t be, and then they would be like, ‘Oh, we’re so sorry.’ I thought, ‘God, I don’t want to have to hear this anymore.'”

When Cher finally conceived Chaz, 41, she was under strict orders to be on bed rest and take her pregnancy day by day. “My doctor said, ‘In the beginning you have to stay in your bed, and then as it gets to be three months, you can get up but you have to stay in the house. I don’t want you riding in cars, I want you to stay at home.’ I did,” Cher explains. “With Chaz, I had a really difficult delivery, and then I hemorrhaged after I came home. It was touch and go. Chaz brought a new element into our marriage. I was a mother now.”

Although Sonny and Cher’s 13-year marriage ended in June 1975, she was thrilled to be a mother. Soon after her divorce, Cher married Greg Allman of The Allman Brothers, who she later divorced in 1979, and the couple had a son Elijah Blue Allman, 34.